Screening the Red Army Faction: a discussion with Christina Gerhardt

Friday, August 10, 8pm

Screening the Red Army Faction explores representations of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in print media, film and art. The book contributes both a new history and a new cultural history of post-fascist era West Germany that grapples with the fledgling republic’s most pivotal debates about the nature of democracy and authority; about violence, its motivations and regulation; and about its cultural afterlife. At the heart of this project rest questions about what role media playing in social movements. Author Christina Gerhardt will lead a discussion about corporate media representations of social movements as well as the self-presentation of movements, with a focus on West Berlin, in the late sixties.

Christina Gerhardt is Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and Associate Professor of Film and German Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is author of Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory (Bloomsbury, 2018), and co-editor of 1968 and Global Cinema (Wayne State UP, 2018). Also related to 1968, she is co-editor of Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long Sixties (Camden House, 2019) and guest editor of 1968 and West German Cinema, a special issue of The Sixties 10 (2017). She has also held fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the Free University in Berlin and at Columbia University and at the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught previously.